Sign In To Search All 3D Commercial Listings on Cube Cities

Cube Cities search results for Downtown Calgary

Searching all commercial real estate listings on Cube Cities now requires users to sign up. When we know more about our users we can provide special features, such as Flights, that make it easy to create automatic tours of commercial listings, as well as Grids, a 3D markup tool for buildings that allows anyone to annotate and share building information, precisely indicating window-level details.

Once signed in, you'll see a new user menu appear. Here's a description of the revealed functionality:

Instant 3D Building Information with Cube Cities Skylines

Now you can find property data for any building in our 3D building information tool called Skylines. Visit Skylines here: www.cubecities.com/skylines

Skylines Start Message

Central Park South

Skylines provides information on over twelve thousand buildings in 20 cities, categorized by 24 building types and classes. Selecting any building in Skylines reveals an information balloon detailing the proper building name and address, number of stories, square footage, management company and year built. Plus, every commercial property has a link to check office and retail leasing activity on the Cube Cities website. Here's a look at some of the largest markets in North America:

(clockwise) New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Seattle, Toronto, Boston
Click to Expand

Skylines Information Balloons

Skylines is a publicly available information tool for building data. There is a link on every building that will open the property in Cube Cities to give commercial leasing information. Please send us feature ideas and help make this tool the best way to look at building data.

Explore Skylines here: www.cubecities.com/skylines

Understanding the Ivanhoé Cambridge Office Portfolio using Cube Cities

Ivanhoé Cambridge is a world-class real estate company that leverages its high-level expertise in all aspects of real estate including investment, development, asset management, leasing and operations, to deliver an optimal return for its institutional investors. The video below is a look at 16 of Ivanhoé Cambridge's trophy office properties distributed over 10 major markets and 3 countries. Cube Cities has visualized each office tower with a floor-level grid, color coded by building class. We've included a look at 73 properties recently acquired by Ivanhoé Cambridge in Silicon Valley with partners TPG and DivcoWest. 

In this visualization Cube Cities has included the portfolio's current space availabilities and highlighted the exact floor location of all available space in each office tower. This portfolio management solution is available for any large commercial real estate organization.


Fullscreen, high resolution link


Here's a more detailed look at many of the Silicon Valley properties, including a visualization illustrating the age of the buildings:


Fullscreen, high resolution link

3D Buildings Without Google: New Technology From the Taipei City Government

3D Taipei - From Local Government

The Urban Planning Department at the Taipei City Government has recently launched an innovative Google Earth website for exploring Taipei's urban fabric. The application uses a low-texturing technique for mass generation of 3D building models. Their concept is to use as few different image textures as possible to keep the models file size small enough to load and unload rapidly as the user flies through the city. As demonstrated in the video below, the buildings flash onto the screen in white and are quickly rendered with simple textures. In fact, the textures are so simple they could be said to resemble a low-pixel video game like Mindcraft. The simple texturing is just enough to appreciate the building materials and most architectural elements. This technique is combined with an implementation of data regionating that intelligently draws only the 3D buildings within the user's range of view.

The user experience is an effective street-level understanding of neighbourhoods, but the trade off is not having the ability to sense urban density by gazing across the virtual skylines found in Google's 3D building imagery. The Urban Planning Department has also included a purple massing layer that illustrates urban density and allows users to click any building and find data points on structural height and building type.

Low Texture, High Efficiency 3D Building Models in Taipei 

Taipei Massing Model

Sample user experience:



Find a link to the Urban Planning Department's 3D mapping website here. Note that it is built on a Microsoft platform that uses web elements specific to Microsoft's ASP framework and works only with Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox do not work. The site is entirely in Chinese but is easily navigable.

Marking Up Manhattan with Google's New 3D Imagery

Sunset over Midtown Manhattan with Building Floor Markers

Fullscreen, high resolution link.

Google released new and extensive 3D building imagery for New York City this week. Instantly, Cube Cities was able to use our technology to map every building in Manhattan on a floor level. Watch the video above to see all of these floor markers come to life, each one clickable to show data. This visualization of Manhattan sets the stage for precise city analysis, giving everyone access to transparent building information. Interested building energy and water usage on a floor level? In cities like New York where property managers disclose this information to the public, we're there.

The Chicago Loop Skyline as a 3D Bar Chart for Buildings

3D Building Bar Charts throughout the Chicago Loop

Another style of 3D Bar Charts, over Chicago's East Loop

We've created timelapsed, building-specific 3D building bar charts. Perfect for delivering building information transparency in real time, or any historic point or timespan. Go inside the visualization here:

Fullscreen, high resolution link

At Cube Cities we're using 3D Bar Charts to compare building performance against peer buildings in the market. These versatile 3D bar charts give our users instant access to every property detail.

Current market conditions? Conditions at the same time last year? Asking rent across the portfolio? Total available area? Water and energy consumption? We provide these visualization services on request using our Verticode platform.

Available now in the following cities:

• New York City
• Chicago
• San Francisco & Bay Area*
• Toronto
• Los Angeles*
• Houston
• Boston*
• Philadelphia*
• Miami
• Seattle*
• San Diego*
• Denver*
• Charlotte*
• Vancouver
• Calgary
• Edmonton
• Montréal
• Ottawa
• Sydney, AU

*Available for Google Earth on iPad and Android

Contact us for a demonstration.

City-Wide Stacking Plans with Markers & Meters

Floor Access to Buildings Downtown San Francisco using Markers & Meters

The Cube Cities API now provides access to Markers & Meters. These new controls provide floor-level information to every building in all of our cities. Each floor marker (seen multicoloured in image above) and energy meter (indicated in orange) is colourized to indicate any user-selected building variable. Perfect for visualizing energy or water consumption on a floor level. But the best thing about Markers & Meters is they are designed to work with Google's new 3D imagery, making them perfect for Google Earth on iPad or Android. Here's a video showing off how buildings downtown San Francisco come alive and accessible with Markers & Meters.

See fullscreen, in high resolution

Additionally, Markers & Meters work in Google's Street View:


See fullscreen, in high resolution

To learn more about the Cube Cities API and how to get access to Markers & Meters, sign up with us and we'll send you the details.

Celebrity Real Estate Views in Manhattan

East 59th Street and Park Avenue

Ivanka Trump lives high above Park Avenue, her penthouse has sweeping, panoramic views of the Upper East Side. Denzel Washington and Sting both live in the same building off Broadway and West 61st Street. Denzel lives on the 24th floor and has a dramatic view of Central Park South. Sting lives thirteen floors below on number eleven, but has another apartment building blocking most of his Central Park view. The video tour below shows off the floor locations and window views from a selection of celebrity real estate, including Jay-Z's Tribeca penthouse, Jim Carrey's property in Chelsea and Madonna's Upper East Side mansion.

Fullscreen, high resolution link

The Cube Cities Grids tool makes all of this possible. It's a simple way to select any floor or window in any building and share that information with direct links.

Jay-Z lives above Hudson Street, he can see the construction of One World Trade Center from his rooftop.

Comparing Google and Apple's 3D Building Products

Google and Apple have both invested heavily in 3D mapping technologies in recent quarters. Google has developed a capability/airforce to capture imagery of cities using 45 degree aerial imagery processing in a process called stereo photogrammetry. Since June of 2012, Google has been releasing new 3D city imagery using this technique. In 2011, Apple acquired Swedish mapping company C3 Technologies for an estimated $240 million, bringing that companies SAAB-developed 3D mapping technology in house, resulting in the release of nearly 100 3D cities on Apple Maps. Also in 2012, Google sold their architectural software product SketchUp to Trimble Navigation, taking with it the 3D Warehouse, which has been the historical source of 3D buildings for Google Earth.

The table below details many of the differences between the competing 3D imagery products that are now available to the mass market on Google and Apple platforms.

Click to Expand

The screenshots below illustrate San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid in the competing 3D building layer products currently available to the mass market on Google and Apple platforms. Note how the entire urban fabric is rendered in the computer generated maps, whereas Google's legacy building layer has missing buildings and contains stylistically different models due to it's human-crafted origin.

Google's Legacy Building Layer (Human Created)

Google's New 3D Imagery (Computer Generated)

Apple's Maps (Computer Generated)

Both Google's old and new 3D buildings are compatible with Cube Cities products. However, Apple currently does not provide a method of loading data into their mapping application, with the exception of the built-in third party data feeds from Tom Tom and Yelp.

Interested in seeing what these 3D building models look like on the inside? The following images show the interior space of the top floors of the Transamerica Pyramid building, all oriented from the same direction. Click the image to expand.

Trimble's 3D Warehouse (Legacy)

Apple's 3D Buildings

Google's New 3D Imagery

                 

Metering Building Class: Boston After Dark

Building Meters downtown Boston in Google Earth

Buildings continue to operate and consume energy after the work day ends and facilities become idle. With Building Meters, Cube Cities provides a unique visual meter indicating the building type and class, energy usage and any other available metric. See the video below to see what Cube Cities can do in Boston using Building Meters and Google's new 3D imagery.


Fullscreen, high resolution link

Imagine real time building data available in this format for every major city in the world. It's the dawn of a new era and Cube Cities is there.

Sunrise over Boston Harbor

Contact us to experience the full interactive product. Options for private implementations of Building Meters are available.